Category Archives: reading

My friend Jennifer Pelland and I are in the May BroadPod.  This month’s theme is “Not Quite Human.  Automatons, AI, and Clones.” From the site:

They can look human, talk and perhaps even feel human.  But are they?  Can an Artificial Intelligence truly have sentience, or is it just clever programming that mimics conscious thought?  A clone may be a match for human DNA, but does a clone have a soul?  Is an android merely a possession, no more entitled to rights than a toaster?

http://broadpod.posterous.com/may-not-quite-human-automatons-ai-and-clones

I think Alexia Tarabotti is my fictional twin.  Well.  Aside from the no soul thing (unless you ask my ex).  Seriously, she’s bossy, blunt, smart, and in your face.  Okay, and aside from the Victorian thing.  I’d make a terrible Victorian.

My television alter ego is, of course, Abby Sciuto on NCIS.

Fragile Things is worth buying just for “Strange Little Girls,”  IMHO.  I also enjoyed “Monarch of the Glen,” which revisits Shadow from American Gods.  I considered posting a spoiler for “Strange Little Girls,” but instead I will quote the preface:

“..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.”

My new best friend for my commute is my Kindle, and I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things on the train and listening to him read his own The Graveyard Book on the drive from the train station.  I’m loving The Graveyard Book, and have had a friend tell me that I can also exercise to audiobooks.  I know that works for Neil Gaiman, but, for me, well, he’s a soft-spoken British man reading his book about a child raised in a graveyard.  I need something with a beat to run to.

It amuses me when he links to a blog post on Twitter with the comment, “Warning:  Contains me,” hence the subject of this post.

Sunday, 1pm, Fairlie, in the Hyatt Regency. Yay, Dragoncon! Gathering of my people!

I read part of “Underworld” in this month’s Broadpod. You can listen at http://broadpod.posterous.com/may-2011-celebrating-motherhood.